THEATER REVIEW : Into the Snake Pit With ‘Boom Boom Room’ : Tragic tale unfolds in ‘70s drama. Though rife with sleaze and hopelessness, the play manages to transcend.

David Rabe may not be America’s Dante, but his best plays--including his 1972 “In the Boom Boom Room,” now in a revival at Ventura Court Theatre--constitute some of the most uncompromising descents into hell the American theater has served up. Two decades have not lessened “Boom Boom’s” astringency and moral outrage, and director Richard Kantor’s staging isn’t trying to dress it up with ‘90s gloss.

To the contrary. This edition of Rabe’s ‘70s-era drama fixes it firmly in that nebulous period when the sexual revolution was in high gear and the Vietnam War wasn’t yet over. The country was aimless, and in the sleazy, titular go-go bar where Rabe’s nice yet nymphomaniac heroine, Chrissy (Erin Chandler), dances for money, there’s the queasy feeling of lives floating, people pointlessly going through the motions.

Without the slightest nod to sentiment or melodrama, Rabe sends Chrissy down her doomed path, as she discovers the real cost and roots of her own sexual hungers, and as she learns to swallow the fact that she’s hopeless. “In the Boom Boom Room” is one play that’s grim, but in a paradoxically transcendent way.

A whole spawn of subsequent plays, many of them by such Los Angeles playwrights as John Steppling and Susan Champagne, seem inspired by this work. But Rabe avoids what others slip into--dramatizing stultifying lives in a stultifying way. Some of Rabe’s monologues--such as Chrissy’s beau Eric’s (James Patrick Stuart) ranting against African Americans--are so deliriously outrageous and verbally charged that your ears ring. His language flowers even as his people are dying on the vine, which few since Shakespeare have accomplished so well.

We might cringe now at some of the play’s lame, hesitant psychologizing, but it passes. What remains is an unfolding tragedy linking child abuse, male predators, duplicity and an ongoing rape of innocence. Through all of this, Chandler maintains Chrissy’s air of cheerful, charming gullibility, while letting us glimpse the gnawing pain under the surface.

She’s surrounded by snakes, and Stuart leads the pack with a megaton blast of sleaziness. His rotund buddy, Ralphie, is given extra doses of creepy anger by Sean Moran. Chrissy’s parents are written as hateful blanks oblivious to Chrissy’s needs, and Ken Kercheval and Flo Lawrence don’t fill them out. Sean McFarland is too over-the-top as Chrissy’s gay neighbor, but Victoria Bousquet, as the go-go dance leader Susan, revels in Susan’s nasty brand of sexual power.

Nelson Coates’ sculptural lights and a set of coolly severe platforms and archways produce the effect of putting the characters in a gallery setting for our observation. Debi Miller’s costumes are ‘70s, right down to the corduroy coats. The clothes were pretty ridiculous then, but the plays--like this one--remain pretty amazing.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “In the Boom Boom Room.”

Location: Ventura Court Theatre, 12417 Ventura Court, Studio City.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursday to Saturday. Ends June 24.

Price: $15.

Call: (818) 763-3856.